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Connection
Is
motherhood a universal bond?
I work odd hours, and sometimes the last
thing I do before bed is work on this magazine. It's a bad idea, like
letting my boy watch The Crocodile
Hunter Diaries on a school night. We get ramped up. We often
have trouble falling asleep.
For the past couple months, I have been staring at the glass of water
on my nightstand and rolling this around in my head: Can you even talk
about motherhood as if there's a single experience of it? Can you strip
away things like age, money, and the degree of difficulty in becoming a
mother? If you do strip these factors away, will you find the common
denominator that all mothers share, distilled and pure? Or is the core
of motherhood one obvious, duh-worthy fact--mothers are women who can
use the phrase "my child"--and the rest of the experience depends on
other factors entirely?
I lie there and I think very hard about what that common denominator
might be, that universal thing that all mothers share. It's usually
quarter past midnight when I get to this point.
Then I wish very much that I had had a few drinks before padding into
the bedroom.
In the past year, motherhood has gotten some big, thought-provoking
attention in the mainstream media. But it's not really motherhood
that's getting the press. It's a certain kind of mother. In The New York Times, Lisa Belkin
wrote "The Opt-Out Revolution"--about mothers with Ivy League
educations and high-powered jobs who then decide to stay home with
their kids. In The Atlantic,
Caitlin Flanagan wrote "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement"--about
rich mothers who hire nannies to care for their children (a group of
mothers that, curiously, she insists on calling "feminists").
Certainly, these are rarified segments of the mothering population. I
suppose the argument could be made that well-educated mothers with
high-paying and prestigious jobs are a good litmus test of how well
women in general combine professional success and family. You know, the
canaries in the career mines deserve the most press. I wouldn't make
that argument, though.
I think that every subset of mothers has its own issues, its own
ranking of what's important. I'm sure that my railing against being
called a housewife after my son was born felt pretty abstract to my
mother and grandmother, who saw being able to stay at home with their
children as a great economic luxury. I'd bet that mothers of profoundly
disabled children would prefer that mothers of normal children save the
oh-the-kids-are-killing-me schtick for someone else. And I have a
terrible nagging suspicion that there are entire groups of mothers out
there who don't have an articulate spokesperson to bring their issues
to public light. How much overlap is there among the subsets of
mothers? And can anybody speak for all mothers?
The leaders of the fledgling mothers' movement have to be wrestling
with these questions, too; the movement's aim is Improving The Lives of
Mothers. As in, all of us. Even if you factor out the mothers who are
assholes, it's a tall order. There are so many of us. And we're so
different. It's hard enough just making chit-chat at the baby pool.
***
Some people, including me, believe that the clues to what's universal
can be found in high-caliber writing. In English-major-speak, this
universal thing--the thing that makes us all siblings under the
skin--is called The Human Condition. For years, I thought it was a
euphemism --I, uh, can't come tonight, I'm down with The Human
Condition. But it's something more slippery, a know-it-when-you-see-it
sort of thing: Ah, someone's telling me the truth.
And it's a specific kind of truth, large and evocative and complex. In
his essay "Why Bother?", Jonathan Franzen interviews Shirley Brice
Heath, a MacArthur Fellow who studies readers of "substantive" (read:
Human Condition-related) literature. As it turns out, mothers of our
generation are particularly hungry for this type of literature. As
Franzen reports it, Heath finds that avid readers of substantive lit
are likely to be those whose lives are rife with personal
unpredictability--for example, "people whose lives haven't followed the
course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don't become
merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, openly gay men from
conservative families, and women whose lives have turned out to be
radically different from their mothers'. This last group is
particularly large."
And what's so appealing about substantive literature? What are we
hoping to bump up against in books and novels? Heath believes that
readers of this sort of fiction find the place where the difficult
parts of life--whether ethical, philosophical, or sociopolitical--are
addressed in all their messiness. She tells Franzen, "Strong works of
fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint
things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They're
everything that pop psychology is not."
In other words, life is framed differently in good writing than it is
anywhere else. This may explain the recent publishing boom in
motherhood books. In the best ones, you probably don't even remember
which of the tidy labels the narrator would otherwise be pinned under:
Attachment Parenting Mother, Working Mother, Soccer Mom, etc., etc Good
writing dodges the labels and the badda-bing solutions offered for
complex conflicts found elsewhere.
One of the latest of these books is Mother
Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood (Washington Square Press, 2004),
edited by Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda B. Swanson-Davies.
Burmeister-Brown and Swanson-Davies, who are sisters, edit the literary
journal Glimmer Train, and
the book is a collection of short stories first published there. Mother Knows isn't about motherhood
in the way that, say, Brain, Child
is about motherhood--that is, almost exclusively from the perspective
of women in the thick of raising kids. Quite a few of the stories are
from a child's perspective, like Junot Díaz's "Invierno";
others, like Richard Bausch's "Weather," examine adult parent-child
relationships. The mothers here are not always sympathetic characters.
The writing is, with a few exceptions, high caliber and gripping. Glimmer Train publishes good
old-fashioned stories--the kind where the wizard behind the curtain
stays there, no self-conscious postmodern peeps at the author here--and
Mother Knows
reflects that. I imagine that when Burmeister-Brown and Swanson-Davies
sit down to hash out what goes in the next issue, the phrase "emotional
resonance" (or something to that effect) gets bandied about. The
stories in Mother Knows are
not sentimental. But they do seemed aimed for your heart and for your
gut.
Maybe that's why the editors have chosen pieces that tend toward high
drama. In Karen Outen's "What's Left Behind," the narrator watches,
horrified, as her husband and two little girls are washed away in a
flood. In the first two pages of Monica Wood's "Frost: A Love Story," a
little girl loses her mother to a car accident and her infant brother
to a fire; her father then abandons her. In Karenmary Penn's excellent
story "Rift," a boy thinks the ghost of his dead mother is reaching out
to him. I could go on.
The undercurrent here is tragedy. Is this, I wondered, what connects
mothers? Fear? The Worst Case Scenario, where we can all shiver at the
terribleness of mothers dying young, babies and children dying period,
or the people who are supposed to care for us being somehow
incapacitated? It's totally possible that this is the connection
mothers share. It's hard to imagine living through anything worse, and
it's hard to imagine a mother who would dispute that.
Or is it just this book? In the foreword, the editors write of their
own mother, who died when the sisters were young. Perhaps living
through that tragedy left them especially drawn to work that attempts
to make sense of it all.
Or maybe it's the nature of fiction. When I took fiction-writing
classes, we were encouraged to think of our characters as people
separate from ourselves. (I gamely played along, although my characters
were always me, or versions of me). We were encouraged to ask ourselves
if this was the moment in our characters' lives we wanted to record. Do
you want to write about a woman who does the dishes, reads a bedtime
story, and then watches a little TV? Or do you want to get to that
pivotal moment in her life?
My favorite stories in Mother Knows
combine the two: the high drama moments and the details of everyday
life, as in Jennifer Seoyuen Oh's "January":
Myung wrapped the child
in a blanket and found an open grave. She threw in the body. She ran,
covering her mouth, from the smell of the dead. She fell into the muddy
weeds. On her hands and knees she cried. "Ah-gi-ya, ah-gi-ya." Baby, my
baby. . . .
Myung had known that the war was coming, but she did not believe in its
reality. She was always busy; there were the meals to cook, the clothes
and diapers to wash, the house to be swept clean. Happy with her baby
and in love with her husband, she was surrounded by the comfort of her
kin and friends.
This may be the most dramatic example, but a similar combination
happens in the stand-out stories like Robin Bradford's "Bob Marley Is
Dead," Lee Martin's "Love Field," Diane Chang's "Mother Knows," and
Nancy Reisman's "The Good Life."
These stories are appealing because they're most like regular life:
stretches of the everyday--walking to the park, unloading the
dishwasher, going out to dinner, talking to your sister on the
phone--marked by periods of high drama. For most of us, tragedy is
averted and we get a glimpse our crazy invisible luck: the objects of
our big, deep motherlove are okay.
For others, tragedy happens. And I don't know that, once a mother's
greatest fear is realized, there is a universal mother bond anymore.
The tragedy can become a wedge. In Nathan Long's "Tracking," a mother
shares a train with members of a wedding party as she travels to pick
up her daughter who's been hiking for a month. The daughter doesn't
show up at the station, and they have to leave the snowy mountain, no
mother-daughter reunion. "The mothers of the bride and the groom then
each took a turn comforting her, though it was impossible to know if
they should be consoling or optimistic," Long writes. "And soon they
realized that between them and Judy's mother lay the unspoken truth
that she was missing a child and they were not, so they left for their
own compartments."
***
In Franzen's essay, Shirley Brice Heath describes some avid readers as
likely to have been "social isolates" as children--that is, kids who
felt different from the world around them and immersed themselves in
books. Heath tells Franzen, "The important dialogue in your life is
with the authors of the books you read. Although they aren't present,
they become your community."
In my own "social isolate" community, Alice Munro is the one who
understands me, Lorrie Moore can be counted on to tell it straight and
unflinching, and Barbara Ehrenreich is my role model. (Jonathan
Franzen's there, too, fretting about some of the same issues I do.) The
poet Beth Ann Fennelly is new, but I'm looking forward to getting to
know her better.
Fennelly's newest book is Tender
Hooks (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), a collection of poems
about her experience of motherhood. The poems are intimate and witty,
and the sort that made me wonder why no one has said it like this
before--it's just right.
Take nursing: "It hurts like when an angry sister plaits your hair."
Or, take what she calls the "Daddy Phase": "I think she just pretends
to be a baby / I would like to pitch a fit / when she ducks my kiss /
my lips two fat hot dogs / cooling at the drive-thru."
Fennelly writes on new motherhood, birth, miscarriage, friendship,
ailing parents, marriage, her younger days--you know, life--and, like
my favorite stories in Mother Knows,
writes of the heavy stuff along with the mundane. In a poem addressed
to a friend who is teaching her yoga poses:
So you teach me to snip
plants and poems, to grasp
my insteps and roll on my
back in Happy Baby pose,
while my own happy baby
masters Sucking-on-Big- Toes,
then
Throwing-Fit-Because-Mom-Takes-Fly-Swatter,
while I master
Quiet-Sex-with-Husband-While-Baby-Watches-Barney,
while you master
Yearning-for-Five-Babies-Grown-and-Gone,
Boxing-Up-My-Mother's-Stuff
Dividing-with-My-Sister-these-Parcels-of-Remorse
Fennelly weaves all of it well. The moments of high drama in her poems
are affecting, but so are the smaller observations she makes about
everyday life. The way that Fennelly gives near-equal importance to
both the ordinary details and the high-drama moments of her life is
comforting to me. I like the idea that they shape us equally.
So I feel a connection to Fennelly's work. Does this mean that she's
plunking some universal mother chord? Or just something that resonates
with me? I don't know. Like everyone else who writes about motherhood,
I can't escape my own bias, the old hey, we both think this, so it has
to be true! Certainly Fennelly touches on the Siamese twins of
motherhood--love for our children and fear that something bad will
happen to them--but I have to admit it's her tone, and her world view,
that I love:
We sit at the table with
the fourth side open,
the perfect family show.
Claire belts "Twinkle, Twinkle,"
How I wa wa (mumble) are!
We beam like stars. Isn't
she gifted? Isn't life great?
What a large target we
make.
The great dramas all
begin like this:
a surfeit of happiness, a
glass-smooth pond
just begging for a stone.
***
To tell you the truth, I would be terrified to meet any of the writers
who make up the community in my mind. What if they're jerks in real
life?
Because it's one thing to try to identify something that connects all
mothers in someone's work, but it's something completely different to
make a personal connection.
Until last summer, I lived in a town where I did not fit in. I had a
list of grievances: the doctor who advised me to watch Billy Graham to
help with my high postpartum blood pressure; the knot of mothers at the
preschool who looked blankly at me when I said "hi"; the typically
uncomfortable playground interactions; the person who snarled Don't
they look important as my husband and I walked by. (Thanks for
noticing!) In public, I was rendered nearly mute. I grew tired of the
social landmines, of trying to circumvent offending someone with my
personality, my politics, my tendency to swear, my sense of humor.
There were plenty of nice people in that town, I'm sure. But I had been
burned too many times. I longed for a secret handshake that let me know
it was okay to say oh, God instead of oh, dear. A password that
signified that everyone here respects the idea that the mother doesn't
always have to cook the damn dinner.
Journalist Marla Paul knows how tough it is to make that personal
connection, even among groups in which you'd think you could turn up a
kindred soul. She has written The
Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You're Not
a Kid Anymore (Rodale, 2004), a self-help guide. She writes that
the "nadir" of her own friendship crisis came at her kids' holiday
concert after they'd moved to a Chicago suburb; she sat alone in the
overheated auditorium and watched as other mothers "greeted each other
like long-lost sisters." Paul wrote about her loneliness in her Chicago Tribune column and was
flooded with letters from women going through the same thing.
Shaped with interesting interviews and stories, The Friendship Crisis hones in on
why old friendships fail or fade, how to find new friends, and the work
it takes to keep the relationship going. If it sounds a little like
dating, that's because it is, Paul says. Until you get to that
comfortable call-at-a-moment's-notice stage, there are certain rules,
like not coming off too desperate.
Paul identifies some times in a woman's life when she might find
herself in a friendship crisis--for example, after becoming a mother,
relocating, or being divorced or widowed. In The Friendship Crisis, she
generally avoids giving advice herself and instead lets her
interviewees tell their stories. It's striking how tenuous these
mother-to-mother connections can be. A few women, recently widowed,
watched as the friends whom they and their husbands shared dropped out
of their lives. Another woman's friendship crumbled because her son
dissed her friend's son. It's disheartening to think that sometimes the
click you feel with a friend has more to do with circumstances than
with you. Figuring out whether a friendship can be saved or if it's
time to let it die a natural death is a recurring theme in The Friendship Crisis.
Paul and her interviewees also offer methods for meeting new friends.
They range from conventional (take a class that interests you) to
pretty damn ballsy (one interviewee had a conversation with her
decorator that culminated in her saying, "We've never had lunch
together. Would you like to be my friend, because I'd like to have you
as a friend.") As I read the book and mentally ticked off the methods I
could see myself trying and those I couldn't, one thing stood out: It
seems like you can't go wrong with a book club. Could it be that Human
Condition thing again?
***
Some noted nonfiction writers have offered up theories about what
mothers have in common. Ann Crittenden might say that, in the U.S. at
least, we're all economically punished. Janna Malamud Smith might say
that our universal mother fears have been exploited pretty much
forever. Daphne de Marneffe might say that all of us have a desire to
be with our children.
I suspect that there is some universal property mothers share, some
mother-current crackling through all of our lives. The other night on
TV, I watched a little girl who had received reconstructive surgery in
the U.S. reunite with her mother in Afghanistan. They hadn't seen each
other for a year, and the mother, a severe-looking woman in a shapeless
black garment, grasped her child and hugged her with a force that I
understood well. A part of me then believed that I understood the
mother well. The story had all the elements of a good universal
motherhood story--fear (would the surgeries go okay?) and love (the
reunion), high drama (the girl had been badly burned) and the ordinary
(the way the mother stroked her daughter's back).
But life outside of literature isn't made up of only these moments. The
other, more specific issues in our lives--wealth, race, disability,
family make-up, age, etc.--often prevail over the simple fact of
motherhood. Whoever represents all mothers is going to have to speak
with a multitude of voices. It won't be easy.
Three mothers walk into a bar. One is a well-paid executive who lives
in L.A. with her three kids, husband, and nanny. Another, who works as
a cashier at a video store, is unmarried with one teenaged child. The
third raises her twin toddlers and cares for her dying great-aunt. So
the bartender tries to think of something to say to the three of them,
something about motherhood that they could all could relate to, but all
she can think of are broad emotions like Love and Fear. The three smile
politely at each other and at the bartender, then sip their drinks in
silence. The bartender cleans some glassware and thinks about what to
pack in her kids' lunches. They're all tremendously relieved when the
priest and the rabbi walk in.
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About the author:
JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is co-editor
of Brain, Child.
I'm
trying to come to grips with two beliefs that I feel strongly. On one
hand, I don't believe in a sisterhood, and I have no problem with
seeing individual women or mothers as villains, both in my own life and
in a larger cultural sense. On the other hand, I believe that if we all
work together, we can lick whatever problem comes our way! It's like
being the lovechild of Margaret Atwood and Jimmy Carter.
Illustration by Jim Dandy
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